Do I Need A VPN At Home?

When you use a VPN, you’re adding a layer of obfuscation to your online activities and digging an encrypted tunnel between your traffic and anyone who tries to spy on you.

- Max Eddy

That makes sense when you’re out and about, using Wi-Fi networks that aren’t your own. But at home, a VPN can help protect you from other threats and may let you access streaming content that would be otherwise unavailable.

WHAT ARE THE THREATS?

Outside your home, it’s hard to tell which networks you encounter are safe. When you’re at a coffee shop, for example, how can you tell which Wi-Fi network is legitimate? Unless the SSID is posted somewhere, you’re just going to have to guess. Clever bad guys will set up access points with familiar names, hoping to trick people into connecting. Once victims are online, the bad guy does a man-in-the-middle attack, intercepting all the information victims send and receive. This includes a lot of mundane stuff, to be sure, but it can also include bank accounts, login information, and worse.

An attacker doesn’t even need to trick you—they just need to trick your phone or computer. Most devices are configured to reconnect to familiar networks by default. But if an attacker uses the same name as a popular WiFi network (think Starbucks or Boingo Hotspot, for example) your devices may automatically connect without your knowledge.

Both of those attacks require a lot of guesswork, but a good attacker won’t bother with that. Instead, they’ll configure their evil access point to switch SSIDs to match the ones your devices are asking for. Granted, this is an exotic attack, but it can be carried out successfully. At the Black Hat conference a few years ago, a security vendor detected an evil access point that had changed its SSID 1,047 times, tricking 35,000 devices into connecting.

In these situations, a VPN is enormously valuable. The encrypted tunnel it creates blocks anyone on the same network as you—even the person managing the network—from seeing what you’re up to.